Quote

Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.

Stanley Kunitz

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Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Gate
Approach
Cliffs
Enclosure
Present
Poems
Snarling
Half
Gates
Smother
Others
Charm
Climbed
Stills
Mets
Sticky
Still
Dog
Charms
Need
Defensive
Needs
Expect

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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
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Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.
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We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
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The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
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End with an image and don't explain.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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